Resistance To Science and Technology by Julian Vigo (Forbes.com)

Just when I thought the narrative about ME and ME patients had turned a corner, along comes this "canard". Yikes, it's bad!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/julian...tance-to-science-and-technology/#2fd6be142bd4

"Science has been up for debate regarding many illnesses and issues of public health. . . . Moreover, who would have thought that in the twenty-first century scientific evidence might even usher forth death threats and violence to the transmitters of certain lines of scientific inquiry?

Take for instance the illness Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), where researchers and practitioners have been regularly harassed and threatened should resultant research suggest anything unpopular. Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiological and liaison psychiatry at King’s College School of Medicine in London, has been under attack for many years by those in the CFS community who decry any suggestion of a psychiatric approach to this condition. While CFS is a highly politicized condition, Wesseley suffered death threats for his work in this field because activists refuse that certain aspects of this condition frame CFS as psychiatric. And CFS is not the only health condition which is accompanied by a vocal, even aggressive, patient-advocate lobby."

There doesn't appear to be a Comments section on the website. However, the writer can be reached at: julian.vigo@gmail.com

I will be sending an email, including a link to information regarding the recent NIH research grant awarded to Ron Davis' group at Stanford.

@dave30th As a fellow journalist, perhaps you'd also like to set her straight.

@JenB Similarly, there are several characteristics identified in the author's Bio that may make you particularly suitable to challenge her viewpoint.

 

You want to be careful what you send in an e-mail, someone who believes the wrong narrative will tend to twist new information to fit that belief.

 

Yes, they might . . . but what you're suggesting seems to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" mindset. In this situation, there is no role for advocacy -- only the expectation that those on the other side of the argument will remain ignorant and ill-informed, possibly intentionally.

The article I linked above seems most likely to have resulted from lazy journalism -- the writer using an easy example to introduce her argument without investigating the details and accuracy of the story.

 

Thanks for posting... don't think I'm going to bother turning off my ad-blocker to access that one though!

Vigo wrote this silly article that touched on CFS in 2016, but it seems it was later withdrawn: https://web.archive.org/web/2016040...ience-deniers-in-the-twenty-first-century.pdf

She complained about people 'mansplaining' to her when they tried to explain the details of the problems with PACE on twitter. I'm not sure it would be worth trying to explain anything complicated to her.

This is an interesting turn of phrase: "because activists refuse that certain aspects of this condition frame CFS as psychiatric"

 

I did not mean don't contact, i meant assume they believe what they wrote and contact accordingly

Very interesting, that extra suggests contact strategically

 

God, what an awful article.

Opinions expressed by Forbin are his own.


[ Of course, I probably didn't take the time to understand it fully - which only seems fair. ]

 

I think there is a different way to look at this particular article. I don't think it matters so much in this case. Whatever this person believes clearly it won't change regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

The timing is interesting-- to stick your neck above the parapet just after a bunch of UK MP's give a good trouncing to the old narrative.

Sounds to me like SW put in a call to an like minded important person and they put in a call to Forbes and some meetings were held and this person either drew the short straw or is totally sucked into the mindset of power=right. They likely have not done a lot of digging and were handed all the material they needed. So they were the right person for the job-- again not likely to be amenable to reason.

Some readers of Forbes of course will likely read it and accept that as the real tale.
It's important that we remain vigilant but sometimes picking your target means leaving something not worth bothering over. Some Forbes readers will be the type that want to believe this regardless of whether they even think it true, no doubt many will just ignore it and move on as it doesn't affect them in any way and a few will hear or read other more factually based science article.

I don't think the BPS are going to put the genie back in the bottle. That ship has sailed.
Let them show their lame attempt for what it is.

But in any regard discussing it with the author will I think not achieve much.

 

On Twitter.

 

The article has less than 200 views btw, so it's not like this is a big deal. This thread has almost the same amount of views.

 

Pretty transparent nonsense. The kind you apologetically hand to the professor at 8:00 after writing it from 2:00-7:53 AM.

 

C+ work.

I mentioned Parliament debate and said investigative skills were 'shoddy'. Sorry/not sorry. In that kind of mood.

 

What struck me about the above extract from the article (I can't bring myself to go off and read the whole thing) was how outdated her sources are. The Independent article she links to was from 2012 when that invented narrative about rabid militant ME activists and death threats was at its height, now long since debunked, and the other link she provides is to the One Click website, which no longer exists, so readers clicking on that link will just get a domain-parking page rather than whatever the journalist was trying to prove! Shoddy investigative journalism indeed, ha ha.

 

Wonder if she'll get a reply?

 

Not really worth drawing attention to this imo (at least, in a way that might get more outsiders to read it). Looking at her twitter feed, does anyone see an indication that she's worth engaging with?

I think Forbes places some writers things on their site for free, as a form of blog so this is not something there's much value in challenging.

 

I went and made a couple of tweets, and seeing her replies to mine and others, she is noticeably out of touch, apparently unaware of everything that has happened in mainstream media re ME in the past couple of years. She only refers to old sensationalist news articles from several years ago when the 'harassment & death threats' propaganda was being promoted, as 'proof' of her claims, and sounds like she may be SMC-influenced. Not sure she would be engage-able, seems very fixed in opinions.

 

The article is a plagiarised (from a previous work from the same author, no less) piece of crap (he said, somewhat plagiarising D. Tuller in turn) but there's the danger of Streisand Effect in criticising the piece very publicly and, inadvertantly, bringing attention to it.

I note that the author asks for money online.
There's more than one way to skin a cat (with apologies to cat lovers).

 

Can you plagiarize something you wrote yourself?

...and as a cat "owner" and occasional cat lover I have no problem with the idea of skinning a cat, provided someone else cleans up the resulting mess


...and just to drift into topic, the article sucks, but I agree it's not worth wasting time on at this stage, let alone giving it hits to make it seem more "popular" than it is, let it sink into the effluent as it deserves.

 

Yep, this author appears to be writing in 2005. Perhaps her internet's been down

 

She's managed to!
Even down to the fact (IIRC without looking at the articles again) that she's plagiarised to the point of including the 'abuse' stuff as the second paragraph in each article!